Hillary Clinton on Kissinger, Albright and Women

Departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently shared some of the wisdom gleaned from twenty years in the White House with Mitt Romney’s favorite magazine, The Economist. Clinton has visited 95 countries and traveled 730,000 miles since joining Obama’s cabinet, and Kirsten Gillibrand recently told BuzzFeed that she’ll be “one of the first to ask Hillary to run in 2016.” In the lengthy interview, Clinton got kind of whimsical about the past and talked about signing a treaty she’d never heard about. Some of the choicebits:

By means ofintroduction:

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“I’ve been really at the highest levels of American political life,” shesaid.

On Henry Kissinger and socialmedia:

“I kid my good friend, Henry Kissinger. Can you imagine, in a world of Twitter, being able to sneak out of Pakistan and fly to China and do secretnegotiations?”

On America as a Pacific power:

“The world had gotten so much younger, and those huge numbers of young people often had either negative views or no views. They didn’t have the memories of World War II or the Cold War or American generosity and responding to a natural disaster that had happened to their parents. So it was a great effort to get back out there, going to Asia first, making it clear that we were a Pacific power …”

On the role of women in Afghanistan and around the world:

“It’s not only the Taliban that hold these deeply traditional views about women’s role in society in Afghanistan or, frankly, elsewhere in the world. One of the reasons that I’ve made it a centerpiece of American foreign policy is that on every indicator one can measure — the economy, GDP growth, on education, on democratisation, the suppression of women, their marginalization — their denial of basic rights means that the society as a whole fails to modernize, fails toprogress.”

On approving a treaty she’d never heardof:

“…I went to the ASEAN headquarters in Jakarta and signed our intent to accede to the Treaty of Amity and Co-operation, which I have to confess I had never heard of before preparation for thetrip.”

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).